Sounds like the "inner-platform effect", which this article's title seems to be a reference to. That's where a system is so soft-coded that its configuration ends up being a (poor) clone of the original programming language. That could be using a key/value table in a relational database, and using custom data and code to reimplement tables/columns/joins/etc. In the case of JDSL, it's using Javascript code and JSON metadata to implement Javascript code.
There's also the "second system effect", where the creator tries to avoid all of the bad things they encountered in the first system, and implement every spur-of-the-moment idea they ever had, all at once.